It’s the most wonderful time (of an accountant’s) year!

                January 31^st, is quickly approaching! The significance of that date is that that is the deadline from the IRS for filing end of year tax forms such as W-2’s and 1099’s.

W-2 to-do

Check with your payroll provider to make sure you have everything ready to send out W-2’s to your employees. The deadline to file and mail them is January 31^st. Also, your employees could be itching to get their taxes done so they can get their refunds. Happy employees generally make happy customers, just sayin’.

1099’s, almost the bane of the small business existence

                This honestly could be a lot worse. For every vendor that you purchase goods and services from in a year and pay more than $600 for those goods and services, if they are a sole-proprietor, partnership, LLC filing as a partnership, or something else exotic non-corporate entity, then you must file form 1096 with the IRS and mail a form 1099 to the vendor. A couple of years ago, the IRS was on the cusp of forcing companies to file 1099’s with EVERY vendor that was paid more than $600. Yikes! The politicians quickly realized that this was a bone-headed move, and reversed course. But don’t think that that sentiment will go away permanently. But for now, you only have to worry about non-corporate entities. Hopefully, you have a form W-9 from all vendors, so you’ll have their tax ID number (Social Security Number or Employer Identification Number), so you’ll be able to quickly process and get those bad boys into the mail. Most accounting software can print 1099 forms directly, and you can get forms from an office supply store.

Help needed?

If you need help and are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, drop us a line at Ledger & Pen, at acrawford@ledgerandpen.com

Clean up your file drawers

Happy new year! My New Year's Day tradition, (besides eating leftovers and catching up on sleep), is to clean out our desk file drawer. I do this, because sometime around late November, it becomes too stuffed to add more to it. So there I was, on the floor, having the kids help me separate papers into piles: one each for the years that I wanted to keep, and one big pile for the stuff that needed to be shredded. 

Most utility bills, bank statements, medical bills, and things of that nature I hold on to three year's worth. That way, in case something did come up, or I needed them for some unknown reason, I've got them on hand. A lot of things are electronic, and I'm working on migrating as many things to an electronic format that I can so I don't have the clutter to clean. I keep all of my IRS documents, I figure by the time I kick the bucket, there probably won't be but 50-60 of them. That sounds like maybe two boxes, I can live with that. 

Here's a good Entrepreneur.com article on business documentation and how long to keep them. http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/225511 

Hope everyone's new year goes well!